Ahmet Samim the Tragedy of the Turkish Left

For twenty years, from 1960 to 1980, the Turkish left struggled to match its remarkable militancy, and not inconsiderable support, to the realities of its country and its time. Ultimately, socialists were able to garner 3 per cent of the national vote in 1979, a disappointing figure. Today their organizations are illegal. Both the failure and the potential of the Turkish left were symbolized by a massive gathering at Taksim, the big square of Istanbul, on May Day 1977. The celebration was called by the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers Unions (DISK)the more radical of two such associations in Turkeyand 200,000 socialists responded. They gathered behind a welter of different, often competing banners. Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way) had 40,000 followers, Kurtulus 10,000. Both were independent groups with origins in the guerrilla struggles of the 1960s. All three of Turkeys pro-Soviet groups were present. There were many student and professional associations, as well as the workers of the unions themselves. The historic disaster which awaited them was pre-figured by the brutal conclusion to the gathering. As a Maoist group attempted

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The Tragedy of the Turkish Left

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to force its way into the meeting to denounce its social-fascist charac-ter, some of its cadres fired into the air. Immediately, another volley from the rooftops was aimed at the crowd. Panic ensued. Thirty-nine were left dead, most crushed in the stampede. Henceforth, the left would be caught in a violent struggle with the far right, an enemy which was not only numerous and unified but which was also closer to various branches of the state, as symbolized by the strategic emplace-ment of the gunmen. For three years fighting escalated. The military prevented an outright fascist victory, and in national terms the real conflict for state power was between these forces on the right. In the process, however, the left through its political immaturity contributed to its own defeat.

The problem has not been one of fragmentation and sectarianism alone, although the inability of the left groups to unite against the fascists has been the most graphic demonstration of their collective immaturity. Before the recent military coup the spectrum of competing groups on the Turkish left was quite staggering. First there was the largest organization, Devrimci-Yol, which was also very loose, almost a federation. Secondly, the Maoists possessed a paper, Aydinlik, which may have been the largest circulation pro-Chinese daily in the world outside of Chinese communities. Thirdly, in the factories and in some trade unions the traditional Communist Party (tkp) exercised con-siderable influence. Yet each of these three general currentsthe independent, the pro-Maoist (or pro-Chinese) and the pro-Sovietwere in turn split between relatively strong contending factions. It must be noted, of course, that the variegated divisions of the Turkish left found a parallel in the traditional instability of parliamentary alliances and succession of governments in Ankara: division is a general feature of Turkish society. Equally important is what all the left groups shared in common at the level of their political practice and conduct of mass work. Across the various divides that separated them, it is evident that all sectors of the Turkish left tended to alienate the masses in the name of the masses. Many Istanbul workers, for example, have to commute across the Bosphorus. The boats are crowded, the journey is especially tiring after work. Imagine their feelings as they crowd off the boat onto the landing and search for their bus for the next stage of their journey, when they are met by newspaper-sellers who cry, power grows out of the barrel of a gun! Nor does only the ultra-left have a monopoly of such counter-productive political activity. The manipula-tive entrism of realistic tacticians who spurn anything that smacks of adventurism can be just as demoralizing, both because of its super-ficial cynicism and because it deliberately disarms, rather than over-arms the necessary combativity of the masses.

A similar criticism might also be levelled at the social-democratic leader of the Republican Peoples Party (rpp), Bulent Ecevit, who managed to gain a slender parliamentary majority in 1977. He failed to consolidate his popular base and, instead of calling upon the working class to assist him in the struggle against fascism, he presented himself as the personification of the state. The rpps Ataturkist origins, its

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tradition of tatism and rule from above,1 triumphed over the enthus-iasm from below which had brought it back to power. De Gaulle in his moment of deepest crisis was able to go on television and appeal to the people, aidez moi. Such boldness was beyond Ecevits reach. When workers went on strike against a fascist terrorist outrage, he scolded them and in effect told them to mind their own business. Ecevits attitude encouraged the far right, demoralized the left, and, paradoxi-cally, disappointed sections of capital as well. The latter were upset because in 1977 some big industrial concerns were willing to take a chance with Ecevit if he could deliver his promised social-democratic solution to Turkey, integrating the working class into national politics and thereby stabilizing its exploitation.

Yet socialists outside Turkey have scarcely recognized the full dimen-sions of the disaster which accompanied Ecevits ultimate ouster from power by Demirel in 1979. Demirels minority government regained power only with the support of the National Salvationists, the Islamic fundamentalist party, and of the Action Party, the Turkish fascist movement whose Grey Wolves have claimed so many lives. This much is widely known, of course. But less understood is how Ecevits inability to prevent such an outcome, after having had the prize of office once more in his hands, was in international terms perhaps a Chile for social democracy in the Third World. My aim in this article will be to inquire into some of the causes of the Turkish lefts impotent potential. I will look at the way the left has made its presence keenly felt whenever the class struggle assumes more violent forms, yet has been quite unable to integrate itself into the daily life of the oppressed, who are badly in need of help and self-organization. This is not a matter of contrasting the parliamentary and the insurrectionary roads to socialism, but of critically examining the militaristic virtues of a left which is almost crippled by the demands of peaceful work or co-operation, despite its collectivist ideology. The brief, chronological survey which follows does not pretend to be a history of Turkish socialism, nor an account of the class struggle in the Turkish forma-tion. It is an initial inquiry into the strategic disorientation and the associated structure of feeling which has kept the Turkish left in its fateful grip.

I. The Kemalist Legacy

The Stillbirth of Turkish Communism

The first Turkish Communist Party was founded, under the leadership of Mustapha Suphi, in June 1920, inside the Soviet Union. The proxi-mity of the Russian revolution thus led to a Leninist organization before most other countries. Despite this, the Third International had little direct effect on Turkish political life, or indeed on the traditions of the Turkish left: in terms of international comparison the greatest

1 See aglar Keyder, The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy, nlr 115, May June 1979, pp. 1116, 40; and F. Frey, The Turkish Political Elite, Cambridge (USA) 1965.

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influence of the tkp was its absence from the scene. The reason was not primarily the subordination of the Partys interests to the state concerns of the fledgling ussr. That happened, but it was the context in which it occurred which was decisive. Turkish Communism was stifled at birth by the prior success of Kemal Ataturks independence movement.

Ataturks nationalism was of a specific variety. Its early victory was rooted in inherited, pre-First World War, Ottoman traditions. A Turkified extension of state-organized, Ottoman enlightenment, Kemals independence movement fought against (but later was aided by) British and French imperialism. It crushed Greek attempts to cash in on the Ottoman defeat in the Great War. But Ataturk did not draw his support from a popular resistance. On the contrary, he based his army on demobilized veterans, while coercing peasants to fight in the ranks (more were killed fleeing the lines than died under Greek guns, a remarkable tribute to the Turkish peasants sense of self-interest). Of course, this weakened Ataturks fighting ability, and meant that the Green Army was at first a vital ally for him. Led by Ethem, a Circas-sian populist, the Green Army was a guerilla-type, peasant force inspired by hopes of expropriating the village merchants and notables. Its existence demonstrated that a liberation which combined class with national struggles was a possibility at that time. Ataturk, however, although opposed to foreign domination, was a Western-oriented modernizer and secularist who had no intention of overthrowing indigenous capitalism. His greatest skill was in combining his domestic aims with a shrewed grasp of international realities. Thus he welcomed Soviet diplomatic support against the British in his most difficult hour, while simultaneously preparing to liquidate his own populist allies.

As his position strengthened, Ataturk crushed the Green Army with his own professional force under the command of his trusted sub-ordinate, General Inn. That same month, January 1921, Suphi and a small group of his comrades were somehow inveigled to visit Turkey from the USSR. They were drowned off Trebizon in a classic, Ottoman-style elimination. Thus both the founding Turkish Communist as well as the most militant class force were cut down within weeks. Two months later the Soviet-Turkish treaty was signed, which in its pre-amble committed both countries to the struggle against imperialism. Two years later, Bukharin was to argue that Turkey: in spite of all persecutions of Communists, plays a revolutionary role, since she is a destructive instrument in relation to the imperialist system as a whole.2

In underdeveloped countries like Turkey, Communists had to form an alliance with the most radical sectors of the bourgeoisie, both in order to legalize themselves, and in order to find some breathing space. Of course, this tends to make socialist movements an appendage of national progress, a universal dilemma posed in the first place by the history of the ussr itself, and one that has not been adequately studied. In Turkey, it was beyond the powers of the small Communist Party to distinguish between the progressive bourgeoisie and radical

2 Cited in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 191723, Volume 3, Penguin Edition, London 1977, p. 479.

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Kemalism, if indeed there was a difference. But it was also very difficult to distinguish between left-Kemalism and its right-wing variants, except with regard to the sole criterion of repression against the Communists themselves. The tkp was thus ideologically disarmed, and further confused by Kemalist modernization. Ataturk was commandist towards the peasantry, cultist towards his own personality, a secular, Western-oriented modernizer who attempted to create some industry based on the state sector. With the curve of Stalinism on the rise in Moscow, Turkish communists proved unable to take their distance from this programme. The result was that a small cadre indulged in a theoretical capitulation which deprived Turkey of any Marxist analysis of its history when this was needed in the 1960s.

Instead of recognizing the Bonapartist character of the Ataturk regime, with its state-organized primitive accumulation which created the conditions for a monopolistic bourgeoisie, the Turkish Commun-ists insisted on seeing the Kemalist movement as a petty-bourgeois force which could be influenced in radical directions. In fact, it was Ataturkism which made use of them, not the other way round. The militant eclectism of Kemalist tatism has had an enduring effect. To give only one telling example: the word devrim which literally means revolution. The official history of the republic records Ataturks revolution. The word is there in one of the six arrows on the symbol of the Republican Peoples Party (along with statism, populism, laicism, nationalism and republicanism). But the official language also talks about the hat revolution, meaning the abolition of the fez; the letter revolution, meaning the Romanization of the Turkish script; the calendar revolution, the surname revolution, etc. In effect, therefore, the word means reform. Communists, who for obvious reasons could not call themselves socialists or Communists, instead referred to them-selves as revolutionaries, making use of that terms official sanction. But the ambiguity has functioned to assist the existing order. The true, Turkish revolution is that decreed by Ataturkwearing a Western hat, etc. Meanwhile, the small and clandestine revolutionary party of Communists was easily followed by the police, and tkpmembers were subject to arrest whenever the government felt the need for an anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Thus the most pernicious legacy of Kemalism for the left has been its combination of radical-progressive policies imposed from above on the Turkish masses. It has created a Jacobin tradition in which the militant struggle for state power, or what is seen as such, continues, separate from and even against the wishes and concerns of workers and peasants. At the same time Kemalist politics left another legacy. Immense social changes took place across the huge and complex land. With deep struc-tures of both Western and Eastern origin, Turkey is reducible to neither. Ataturk represented one moment of this special combination, when Turkey became a modern nation-state, albeit one without the critical attribute of popular participation. That paradoxwhich distin-guishes his nationalism from almost all othersis perhaps the key to understanding Turkish developments today. But it does not mean that the peoplepeasants, workers, bourgeoiswere not tremendously effected by the modernization of a backward country even if the process

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had been initiated by dictatorial means. In response, much of the creative and thoughtful modern culture in Turkey has been socialist or left-populist in character. Although the TKP was one of the most marginal and ineffective Communist parties of the 1930s and 1940s, it had as one of its members, Nazim Hikmet, Turkeys supreme poet.

The Turkish Democratic Pronunciamento

Until independent socialist activity was legalized by the constitutional measures which followed the 1960 coup, the Turkish left remained totally marginalized through the postwar period. In 1950, the Demo-cratic Party came to power and launched a McCarthyite campaign against the TKP, whose leader and successor to Suphi, Sefik Husnu together with his comrades was put in jail. Under conditions of defeat and repression, a fierce competition for the future leadership of the TKP ensued inside the country, between Mihri Belli and Zeki Bastimar. The latter left the country after imprisonment and became General Secretary after the death of Husnu. Meanwhile Belli remained behind, outside the party, biding his time and making his influence felt after his own fashion. The TKP was thus reduced to a small migr organization, with a foreign radio transmitter for which Moscow provided the electricity. Bastimars own successor, Ismail Bilen has now lived out-side the country since the early thirties and indeed has had an ambigu-ous relationship to the Soviet state. But if the Turkish left was frozen during the Cold War, the class character of the Turkish state underwent decisive modification, which brought the bureaucratic monopoly of Kemalism to an end. The nature of these changes must be briefly considered here, in order to see how the Marxist left failed to compre-hend their real character, with painful results for all in the subsequent decades.

In 1946, Inn, who had succeeded Ataturk to the Presidency, announ-ced the creation of a multi-party democracy. During the Second World War, Turkey had blown with the Nazi wind. Now with the lure of American aid and the threat of Soviet demands for war-rights over the straits, it turned sharply towards the United States. Ironically, the Kemalist bureaucracy made its offer too eagerly for its own good. The swiftness of its democratic pronunciamento predated the onset of the cold war when Washington began to show its preference for stable dictator-ships along the Soviet border. Nonetheless, the westernizing tendency in Kemalism made a significant commitment to a liberal order with free elections. The result was its popular ejection from power four years later. A peasantry tired of bureaucratic exactions, a merchant class eager to gain control over capital, combined to give the Demo-cratic Party of Menderes an overwhelming majority based on a huge turnout; this new class alliance was instantly rewarded by the boom conditions of the Korean war (a war which also demonstrated Turkeys new international allegiance as 5,000 of its troops were deployed there to battle against Communism).

aglar Kayder has emphasized that the 1950 elections represent the watershed from one pattern of capitalist development to another

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much more acutely exposed to shifts in the world capitalist economy.3On the other hand, until now the Marxist left has generally interpreted the 1950 change of power as a counter-revolution, because the Demo-crats were pro-imperialist internationally, subservient to the United States, eager to give capitalism some popular support, and culturally conservative. In fact, in the villages, where the majority of the popula-tion lived, what took place was a real extension of civic rights. The least significant peasant suddenly found he had a place in the political structure. He gained a small but important benefit. He saw an end to the unquestioned supremacy of the bureaucratic emissary from the towns. But in the towns, the state functionaries and the intellectuals feared the consolidation of his new power bloc, which even threatened to exclude the army from the inner circles of power. As it became clear that the Democratic Party would be immovable electorally, corruption mounted and Menderes gathered more power into his hands. Finally he was removed from power by the army, who, after an absurd and disgraceful trial, executed him and two of his colleagues. This coup on 27 May 1960, headed by General Gursel, forged a counterweight to the 1950 election.

Fearing that a consolidated rural majority might permanently exclude it from power, the Kemalist elite drew up a new constitution which safeguarded its position through reforms aimed to create new urban allies. Thus the new constitution ensured a wide range of civil rights and freedom of the press as well as providing for proportional repre-sentation in the election of members of parliament. A subsequent law gave legal respite to trade union organization for the first time. To this extent the Kemalists complemented and completed the democratic transformation initiated in 1950 with the extension of voting rights to the peasantry. The two moments, however, exhibited paradoxical and contrasting consequences. Thus the 1950 election was a democratic and progressive event that had a reactionary outcome, while the 1960coup was blatantly undemocratic yet produced a liberal reform of Turkish government. How should these two events be understood? A Kemalist would undoubtedly contrast the reactionary consequences of 1950 with the gains of 1960. A socialist view should have, on the contrary, recognized the positive aspect of the politicization which was confirmed in 1950 as well grasping how the dynamic of military inter-vention which secured the passage of the new constitution in 1961simultaneously threatened to annul its effective application. In other words, without dissenting from the Kemalist evaluation of the policy results of the two changes (reactionary politics after 1950, progressive reforms after 1960), a socialist assessment of the underlying political form of these two critical developments should have completely reversed the positive and negative signs attached to them. Furthermore, a socialist analysis should also have foreseen that to continue to strive for radical-military solutions to the countrys crises would be to perpetuate an historical anachronism. For the final effect of the remarkable constitu-tional coup of 27 May 1960 was to complete the dismantling of the ambiguity in the Kemalist state, henceforth a leftist repetition of the coup was impossible. Yet it was precisely the desire for change from

3 Keyder, p. 19.

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the top down, in the guise of a call for national democratic revolution, which tragically became the dominant strategic goal of most Turkish socialist groups in the decade which followed. By its failure to accurately understand the meaning of the 1950 and 1960 events, the Turkish left was theoretically and politically shackled to an obsolete and romanticised vision of an alliance between the working masses and a progressive state bureaucracy.

II. The Rise of the New Left

1961A Brave Beginning

While certain articles in the Turkish penal code (adopted from Musso-linis) continue to forbid an open communist party, the new constitu-tion specifically allowed for the creation of a socialist party. Thus in 1961, fifteen trade union leaders (two of whom later turned out to be police agents) organized the Turkish Workers Party (tip). They had broken away from the main trade union federation Turk-Is4, and at first their new party had a strictly ouvrierist ideology which attracted little support. Realizing their mistake, they invited Mehmet Ali Aybar to become the partys chairman with the aim of giving it a broader, dynamic appeal. Aybar was a well-known writer and professor of law who himself had been victimized in an early witch-hunt. Originally he had supported the Democrats in their struggle against the single-party regime of rpp, and he was one of the very few leftists who grasped the real significance of the opening of the political system in 1950. After his appointment tip came to play a very important roleindeed a seminal onefor the Turkish left, and it was eventually through the vortex of tips internal struggles that the various fragments were dispersed which make up a large part of the contemporary left. In the beginning, however, tip was distinguished by its freshness and un-orthodoxy. In contrast to the older tkp, which remained small in numbers and monolithic in organization, the tip was heterogeneous to the point of populism, campaigning openly and energetically, and for a short time capable of linking socialist arguments to the concrete problems of the massesa quality which makes the early tip unique until this day.

The emergence of tip as a unitarian socialist party was also partly due to the situation in the international workers movement at the time of its creation. Krushchevs de-Stalinization had not yet divided world communism and the Cuban and Algerian Revolutions were still in their heroic stages. Ten years later such ideological unity seemed inconceivable as new Maoist and Guevarist currents contested with older, orthodox parties. Indeed if the specific political essence of tipcould be summed up in a single sentence, it could be said that genera-tionally and in Anglo-American terms it was a unique party of the old new left. It contained a panorama of ideas, attitudes and priorities. Thus while not favourable to the dictatorship of the proletariat, it

4 Turk-Is had been originally founded with the sponsorship of the American Insti-tute of Free Labor Development (AFILD) as part of the worldwide crusade to establish pro-US, anti-communist trade union federations as bulwalks of the Cold War.

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was certainly socialist and even pro-Soviet in a peace-movement fashion. Unlike vaguely comparable groups in Europe or North America, however, tip was not merely a collective of intellectuals. It was able to articulate trade-union demands with some programme for land reform as well as embracing the aspirations of the radical sectors of the Kurdish minority.

As a counterpoint to tip, with its western socialist hope of trans-forming Turkish society through the creation of a mass workers party, was the political current which emerged around the Istanbulweekly, Yn (Direction). The paper had been founded in December 1961 by a young writer named Dogan Avcioglu and opened with a manifesto that attracted 500 prominent signatories and such widespreadinterest that its circulation quickly reached 30,000a phenomenal figure for a leftist paper in Turkey at that time. The politics of Yn comprised what might be called a social-democratic inflection ofKemalism: anti-feudal, tatist, yet Third Worldist. For Avcioglu and his sponsors, under-development was the primary characteristic of contemporary Turkey and rapid economic growth, led and planned by the state, was the fundamental political task. In the absence of a largeworking class and confronted by overwhelming peasant population, Yn argued for a national front in which all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces could combine in order to create a national demo-cracy in which power would be altruistically shared by all patrioticstrata. In parliamentary terms, Avcioglu argued for an Assembly in which the masses held 75% of the seats, while the progressive intelli-gentsia and its cadres occupied the remainder. Thus Yns politics were actually a rather sensitive reflection of the dilemma faced by progressives in Turkey in the early sixties. Kemalist radicalism, con-firmed by the advances of the 1961 coup, beckoned across a backward countryside dominated by superstitious petty landholders. Yn articu-lated the strategy which would become the keynote of the decade: the national democratic revolution, a left-Kemalist substitutionalism which projected that the lite, technocrats and officers, would leadTurkey independently on behalf of the workers and peasantsfor thepeople, despite the people.

The 1965 Elections

In this fundamental sense Yn, although drawing upon leading tipcontributors as well as those to its right from the rpp, projected leftishpositions which were really more backward than those of the other groups. There was, of course, some truth in the argument that Turkish society was both underdeveloped and not naturally suitable for a parliamentary socialism based upon a Western European model. Butthere was no truth in either the underlying diagnosis or the prescrip-tion: the Turkish bourgeoisie was not merely comprador, the Turkisharmy was not commanded by radical-socialist officers. The argumentscame to a head only after tip scored its moment of triumph. In 1965, inthe first national elections fought by tip it gained 300,000 votes and 15seats in the assembly, primarily due to the system of proportional representation and to the radio access it was granted. It was a stagger-ing victory, but momentary. For one thing, the election rules were

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immediately changed so as not to bestow such favours on small parties in the future. More important, the votes showed that the Workers Party had not become a workers party. In Istanbul, where it obtained nearly a third of its votes, these seem to have come pre-dominantly from middle-class progressives rather than from the poorer, workers quarters. In the countryside, tips support came overwhelmingly from Kurds and Alevis (the Turkish Shiite minority). Aybar had laid great emphasis on land reform and had campaigned across Anatolia, to that extent the vote was a worthy achievement. But his trade union backers had not been able to deliver their constituency on any scale. Thus the argument that the workers represented the base for an enduring socialist strategy seemed gravely weakened, while at the same time leftish radicalism surged. It was precisely then, however, that the Turkish working class started to move, even as the left intelligentsia was swept by theories which abandoned interest in the proletariat.

This 1965 election gave Demirels right-wing justice Party, the succes-sor to the Democratic Party of Menderes, an absolute majority in the legislature based upon a peasant plurality which seemed bound to invite a re-run of the 1960 military intervention. This was not because of any simple economic failure, on the contrary there was an extremely high rate of growth, at a steady rate of between 4% and 6% a year during the sixties. The combination of both rapid demographic and industrial expansion was typical for developing countries in Turkeys position. The labour force increased greatly, but so too did the unemployed, proportionately and absolutely. Trade union membership rocketed after 1967, and between 196070 rose from about 250,000 to over 2,000,000. Enterprises affiliated to employers unions rose from 1,500to over 10,000.5 In political terms a key area of growth was higher education, which in five years from 1965 to 1969 increased its numbers from less than 100,000 to over 150,000. This included both universities and teachers training colleges, where ultimately the fascists were to gain a major hold. At the same time religious colleges quintupled their intake from 10,000 to 50,000 recruits. West European countries experienced a similarly rapid increase in their student bodies at a time of generalized economic growth. In Turkey not only was this process much fiercer in terms of the impact on the inherited structures, so too was the influence of the changes in the world political climate. The USdecision to invade and bomb Vietnam in 1965; the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966; Che Guevaras example in Bolivia in 1967: all helped to inspire revolutionary sentiments in students across the world. In Turkey the Third World themes of this moment seemed all the more compelling, especially as the United States had military bases across the country, and President Johnson had prevented Inn from intervening in Cyprus. Hostility to reactionary Greek influence in Cyprus was a heady leftist brew of Turkic anti-Americanism.

5 In the course of the 1960s alone, the population grew from 27 to 35 million, with the urban population rising from 9 to 14 million. Despite this dramatic increase in urbanization, the demographic pressure in the villages was reinforced by two million inhabitants. For data on the size of trade unions, the size of the student population and other politico-demographic data see Jacob Landau, Radical Politics in Modern Turkey, Leiden 1974.

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In this atmosphere the relatively staid if eclectic pages of Avcioglus Yn diminished in their appeal. The circulation had sunk gradually towards 10,000 sales and it closed in early 1967. Its place was taken by two more strident competing weeklies: Ant and Turk Solu. Under the banner of Independence and Social Justice, Ant (which means pledge) was an Istanbul weekly, founded in January 1967, which supported the more radical and activist tendency in tip. Its contributors included Yasar Kemal and Can Yucel, respectively the best Turkish novelist and poet of the time. Turk Solu was even more rabidly anti-American than Ant, and its line was inspired by Mihri Belli, who had failed to gain the leadership of tkp in the 1950s. He had been a con-tributor to Yn where he supported the arguments for a broad national front. Now he called for a National Democratic Revolution with youth as its vanguard. The difference between Bellis Turk Solu and the Yn of Avcioglu was that the latter wished to rely upon the patriotic officers and had himself been a member of the military-appointed 1960Constituency Assembly, while Bellihaving come from the tkp and having been outflanked politically by tip in the early sixtiesneeded to organize a distinct power base for himself. Hence his stress on inde-pendent student militancy as a strategy of opening a path for the radical officers. Students would agitate, officers would strike, and a national junta would take power.

1968The National Democratic Revolution

In this already existing hothouse atmosphere of Turkish student politics, the dramatic events of 1968 (the Tet offensive in February, the French student rising in May, and the Czech invasion in August) had an even greater impact than in most countries. With Bellis National Democratic Revolution (or ndr) as their siren call, students in Istanbul began to occupy their campus buildings as soon as word reached them of the Sorbornne take over. In the West, May signified the beginning of something consciously unorthodox, revolutionary but not Communist; in Turkey, on the other hand, there was no similar sense of unorthodoxy nor a feeling of a break with Stalinism such as was experienced by their European counterparts. Instead there was a profound sense of continuity and the renovation of national revolutionary tradition. This absent break with the past (with Stalinism and Kemalism in particular) moreover contributed to one of the gravestcrises of the Turkish left when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia justthree months after the first student occupations in Istanbul and at theheight of the new militancy. The tip student group, in particular, wasunable to respond to the temper of the times. When it tried to approachAybar for advice on the sit-in he made himself unavailable. Meanwhile, students attracted to the ndr line tried to push the militants into direct action. The most charismatic was the warm andhandsome Deniz Gezmis, who having read Carlos Marighellas guerrilla manual led a group to capture a soldier of US imperialism.Unfortunately under cover of night they kidnapped a black, whom they then had to release because of his colour! In another, more serious incident, a student was killed while demonstrating against the visit of the US Sixth Fleet, and the police were successfully chased awayfrom his funeral. In this atmosphere tip students, who had provided the

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basis of the student organization, were able to define themselves only negatively, and the energy of the movement flowed towards the ndrline.

But Aybar had other considerations. Because of the change in the electoral law, tip could not hope to repeat its 1965 success and he shifted emphasis from class interest to human freedom in an attempt to broaden its appealespecially to Kurds and Alevis. His emphasis on humanism was both sincere and calculated. He felt that socialist ideas had reached their natural limit in Turkey for the time being. Hence his vigorous condemnation of the Soviet invasion. He was opposed by the pro-Soviet cadres in the apparatus, and their apparently harder line won the support of the younger Istanbul militants. Aybar won the tipCongress vote on the issue, but the generational polarization of the party crippled it permanently. Not only did its representation collapse to two in the Assembly the following year, but its local chapters were unable to hold their own against the burgeoning numbers of ndrfollowers. Aybar resigned, and tip effectively folded. Its legalism lost it its real potential.

Thus Belli, the undisputed leader of the ndr movement, became the spiritual father of Dev-Gen, a hybrid formation which was part student movement, part revolutionary association. Since Belli had no desire to create a real party which might menace his hoped-for alliance with the military, Dev-Gen provided its members with almost noexperience of organizational discipline. It was not surprising, therefore that, at the peak of its influence in 196970, the group began a series of inevitable schisms and divisions. The first defection came about as a result of Bellis refusal to print an article which challenged the concept that Turkish society still contained a significant feudal remnant. The split-off group responded by starting a new journal called Proleter Devrimci Aydinlik (pda). (We will return later to the effect of these spurious debates over Turkish history which functioned in the end to alienate serious militants from theory altogether.) The real problem was inherent in the heart of ndr strategy itself: if the presupposition for revolution was the assumption of power by a radical junta, what should be the role of Marxists? The pda split sharply posed this question; some time later they found an answer: Maoism. Other dissidents within Dev-Gen, however, were not attracted to the Maoist enthusiasm for a protracted peoples war waged from the countryside. Not only did they regard the peasantry as more politically backward than the urban masses, but they were also eager to find some-thing quicker than a long politico-military detour through the country-side as a route to revolution. These ndr militants, therefore, were captivated by Guevarist ideas of urban-guerilla focoism adapted to a Turkish terrain where a revolutionary junta was foreseen as imminent. The result was a compelling fit between Guevarist concepts of revo-lutionary immediacy and the tradition of left-Kemalism.6

6 Regis Debray wrote: Under certain conditions, the political and military are not separate but form one organic whole . . . The vanguard party can exist in the form of the guerrilla foco itself. The guerrilla force is the Party in embryo. This is the stagger-ing novelty introduced by the Cuban revolution. (Revolution in the Revolution, London 1968, p. 120.)

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Focoism or Proletarian Politics?

But at least it could be said that Guevara died in 1967 before the proletarian risings in his own Argentina presented Latin America with an alternative to the guerilla column. In Turkey it was the other way round: focoism followed a working class mobilization, on 16 June 1970. disk had called for a protest against legislation which threatened to limit trade-union organization. It would have been pleased if 20,000had turned up. Instead, spontaneously and from all quarters of Istanbul, over 100,000 workers demonstrated. The police tried to hold them back, and then called the military. The authorities raised the bridges over the Golden Horn to try and stop the march. But with women in the leadthe historic sign of class temperthe demonstrators breached the defences. There was one small clash, in which a policeman and two workers were killed, and some arrests. The workers broke into the police stations to free their friends. There was no looting or other violence. In the Turkish scene this spontaneous discipline was perhaps most impressive of all. Proletarian politics was now on the agenda.

The 16th of June had a traumatic effect upon Mihri Bellis National Democratic Revolution. In the past, ndr students had fought the police, but whenever the military appeared they dispersed, shouting Army and Students Hand in Hand, or On to the National Front! Suddenly the massive support for the demonstration showed that the working class movement had ripened, but the ndr, conditioned by its ideology and implicated in the collapse of the Istanbul branch of tip, mistook the message. Instead of recognizing that the new popular combativity was a signal for renewing political agitation in proletarian milieux they interpreted it as a clarion call for the beginning of the armed struggle and they took to the mountains. thko, the Peoples Liberation Army, was first to strike, led by the charismatic Deniz Gezmis, . A second group, known as the thkp-c, the Peoples Liberation Party and Front, soon followed suit with slightly more technical success. It was led by Mahir ayan who later became a central cult figure for the entire Turkish revolutionary movement. Dangerously egocentric and tormented by fears of his own pacifism, ayan was killed before he was thirty, after leading his group to rob banks and seize hostages for ransom. The initial successes of the new guerrilla groups, coming so quickly on the heels of the working-class action of 16 June, embolden hopes of a rapid move by the ndrs putative allies in the military. Indeed, after so many years of agitation there were, in fact, circles of left-inclined officers in the armed forces, but far from being able to organize a coup, these leftist plotters were quickly suppressed by their superiors. The military regime which took power on 12 March 1971 used martial law to round up thousands of revolu-tionary students and workers, while simultaneously launching a major drive to smash the embryonic guerrilla groups. The military aim in 1971was quite limited: rather than supplanting the existing capitalist system or installing their own dictatorship, the armed forces were content to pursue a viciously effective counter-guerrilla campaign with their American equipment. Hundreds of ndr militants were horribly tortured by their military allies.

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At first, the overwhelming majority of left tendencies had published proclamations supporting the militarys assumption of power. In some between one could sense the lines the pressure of the teeth against the tongue. But because of its roots in the ndr the left felt obliged to interpret the intervention as its own success and failed hopelessly to uphold the principle of the popular vote. Sustained by a mystical faith in the left wing of the Junta, it accepted a guerrilla fight against the army. The sense of defeat was therefore all the more profound in prison, as there could be no pride in having resisted an enemy to the last. It was very much the lefts own defeat. Amongst some of the leading militants, jailed en famille, the obviousness of this broke their old fanaticism. Political self-criticism was combined with personal tragedies. The sense of having betrayed the masses, of having acted in the interests of imperialism in willingly serving the Kemalist junta, the growing awareness of ignorance of the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, weighed heavily over the consciousness of these young militants. There was an inevitable mystic-moralistic quality in these very human inner conflicts, inevitable because of the subjectivity imposed by prison conditions and the inadequacy of their socialist culture. In the midst of all these torrents of self-criticism, anyone could see that Marxist politics in Turkey was bound to undergo a significant change.

There were two points on which almost everyone agreed: the major shortcomings of the movement in general had been the lack of a firm relationship with workers, and the lack of international relations or global perspective. Behind this consensus was a struggle between two lines which can be schematically identified as: (i) a tendency to make radical self-criticism about the past, and (ii) a tendency to accept the essence of the past whilst making some tactical concessions to preserve continuity. For a number of reasons at the time, all this made Maoism particularly attractive to certain militant-leaders. China was stepping up its criticisms of the ussr to hysterical levels, and naturally those who had associated themselves with armed expeditions did not feel sympa-thetic to the moderation associated with Moscow. The Peoples Liberation Army in particular could explain the disastrous end of their childish focoism as something which stemmed from an incorrect estimate of the Soviet Union. If the ussr had not been social-imperial-ist it would have helped and victory would have been achieved! Suddenly, the bulk of the Liberation Army people became Maoist. The fact that they could now argue for Peoples War, also solved the problem of their missing relationship with the proletariat.

The Search for New Strategies

Had these arguments been limited to a few prisoners in a general con-text of serious re-assessment and over a sufficient time to learn about what the Peoples Republic of China was actually doing internationally, then little harm would have been done. But this was not the case. In 1974 there was an amnesty and the militants found themselves released into a situation where the mass youth following of the left had grown enormously, despite the debacle of its actions. Suddenly forced back to life, the left mutated into a wild variety of groups and sects, much more diverse and complex than in the sixties, and a frantic strategy hunting was

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indulged in with often absurd results. In an elaborate repetition of the way focoism was embraced, universal theories or received lines from different socialist states were incorporated wholesale into the Turkish context. One of the determining reasons for this wasteful and mentallyexhausting process was the vacuousness of the debate in the 1960s.Then a foreign observer might have thought the whole left was engagedin a discussion about the historic presence of feudalism in Turkey. In fact the arguments were formalistic and a priori, the twists and turns oftheir scholasticism mocked the idea that theory was a foundation for practice. Militants became fed up with historical analysis, and had no tradition of proven political theory to draw upon. They thus launchedinto action again after prison in the midst of an utter confusion of ideas. In particular, there was no Marxist analysis of Turkish life or politics which approached the country from the point of view of the masses. Indeed, even this formulation concedes too much to thosedebates. The historical class experience of Turkish workers and peasants had become highly varied. But socialists were determined tochange it, before they really knew what it was.

It was hardly compensation that the Army was similarly foolish. The coup of March 1971 was meant to save the fatherland. Such generosity was not needed, and somewhat absurdly, the soldiers replaced Demirel with a civilian, technocratic brain cabinet under Erim. Far from weld-ing together a new popular consensus against the left, the Armysrepression in 1971 succeeded only in creating resistance from all levelsof Turkish society. In an attempt to control meat prices, for example, the soldiers arrested butchers; to restore a semblance of order they shaved hippies and closed popular coffee shops. Meanwhile the military intervention was polarizing the Republican Peoples Party.Inn, the successor to Ataturk and the statesmen who introduced democracy to Turkey in 1946, was still head of the rpp and welcomedthe military role. But Ecevit did not. He had introduced the legislation after the 1960 coup that enabled workers to strike, and now he becamethe most vocal opponent to the governments appointed by the Army.With enviable strategic vision, he tried to renovate the base of the rppby channelling the new working class militancy which had beenrevealed in the 16 June demonstration and which the far left had sotragically ignored. Presenting himself as the peoples hope, he challenged Inn, and, much to the general surprise, forced the older statesman to step down from the helm of the rpp. This meant that both of Turkeys main parties were now opposed to the continuing politicaldominance of the military, and when General Gurler attempted to makehimself President, both Ecevit and Demirel combined their votes in theAssembly to block him. As a result, new elections were held, the rppbecame the biggest party (although fatefully short of an absolute majority), and Ecevit took office as Prime Minister in partnership withthe National Salvation Party.

The Emergence of the Fascist Menace

Immediately, the key issue was an amnesty for the militants rounded upduring the armys interregnum. Previously, the few thousand guer-rillas had been holding the country at gunpoint, now their freedom

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became essential, not because of any agreement with their beliefs, but because the question of amnesty came to symbolize the return to democracy and civil rights. Ecevit insisted upon a release, one section of the Salvation Party voted against, but the partial legislation which resulted, in which some would be given freedom and others not, went to the constitutional court, who found it discriminatory and ordered a complete release of those still imprisoned for political reasons. When they came out, they found a much greater degree of support and sym-pathy for their cause than before they had been rounded up. Yet, ominously, the new temper of militancy in the early seventies was not monopolized by the left. Ecevits need to make an alliance with the National Salvation Party was significant in this respect. Not only had these Islamic fundamentalists made considerable parliamentary and popular gains, but so too had the fascist National Action Party. It was the spectacular growth of a paramilitary challenge from the far right which was to eventually force the revolutionary left into a second round of armed struggle.

In 1974, just after the amnesty, the Greek Junta attempted to annex Cyprus and when the British Labour government refused to intervene, the Turkish Army invaded on Ecevits orders. The Peoples Hero became a national hero too. On the whole, the left behaved creditably and spurned chauvinist celebration of the military success. In the cabinet, however, Erbakan, head of the National Salvation Party, tried to take his share of the glory, and Ecevit felt himself increasingly fettered by his coalition. He then made a decisive error. Presuming that his reputation would now enable him to carry the day, he tried to govern alone with the aim of calling elections, which would certainly have swept him to power with an absolute majority at that time. However, the Constitution forbad the calling of interim elections before they were due, without an absolute vote in the Assembly. This democratic device boomeranged: it deprived Ecevit of the power to dissolve the Assembly and to obtain a mandate to rule alone. Neither Demirel nor the smaller parties would vote themselves out of the Assembly, and they refused to endorse elections. Instead, under the canny leadership of Demirel, a right-wing coalition of the justice, Action and Salvation parties took office.

The injury to Turkey was devastating and may prove permanent. The Right did not simply take power, they plundered the state. Positions in the bureaucracy were shared out, while the economy was inflated by a false boom financed by huge and irresponsible foreign borrowing. The main beneficiaries of this official piracy were the fascists, whose Grey Wolf Commandoes now acquired state protection and official sinecures. The consequence was a violent polarization between the left and the extreme right, with Ecevit helplessly in opposition. The error he made seemed incomprehensible, but is now clear: his fault then and subsequently was to rely upon himself at a time when Turkey no longer needed a saviour. If a political leadership had existed which was capable of tapping the potential of working-class militancy, the country might have been spared the decade that followed with its rising graph of violence and political terror. But the presence of the fascists and their increasingly effective emplacement in the educational

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system, local government and armed forces threw the left into a predominately defensive, but necessarily combative armed struggle. Under such conditions it was impossible to shake off the legacy of focoism or to make a new political departure.

III. An Anatomy of the Left in the 1970s

The Independent Left

By sheer number of incarnations, Maoism appeared to be the dominant current within the post-amnesty left as no less than five substantial sects feuded with each other over the local franchise of the Cultural Revolution. Significantly, however, the two largest organizations of the Turkish leftand those most closely linked to the original, pre-Maoist ndr armed struggle movementremained independent of the sinophile pole. The continuing vitality of the Cuban model in the early 1970s prevented their capitulation to either of the two main variants of Maoism (i.e. the formalist radicalism of Lin Piao or the serpentine duplicity of Chou Enlaiboth of which had the Great Helmsmans head stamped in obverse). For these non-Maoist currents, Mahir ayan was the legendary figure and the great majority of the students who had become socialists during the period of military rule did so under the spell of his legend. After the amnesty, however, the followers of ayan underwent a dual crisis of leadership and strategy. This crisis stemmed from the almost total discrepancy between the attitudes of the experienced members, who had become hostile to the suicidal adventurism of ayans actions, and the naive enthusiasm of the younger militants outside prison who continued to idolize ayan. After a period of wavering and confusion, two major lines emerged. Some leaders responded to the enthusiasm of the younger generation and thus captured the greater part of this potential. Others who explicitly criticised ayan founded a smaller group known through their journal as Kurtulus, (Liberation).

Immediately after the split it seemed as if Kurtulus, despite its smaller size had the best chance of accomplishing a theoretical and practical renovation. As its leaders moved away from ayanite adventurism, they seem to be rediscovering a more orthodox and disciplined Marxist politics. Meanwhile the larger group, which eventually called itself Devrimci-Yol (Revolutionary Way) and had originally embraced ayans formulations in a dogmatic mode, retained the loose federalist structure which had characterized the earlier, ill-fated Dev-Gen. Paradoxically, as the more responsible leaders of Devrimci-Yol began to respond to both the impracticality of their credo and the tensions inherent in their fluid organizational form, they became gradually more open to contemporary Marxist thinking, while Kurtulus, increasingly became bogged down in orthodoxy and failed to sustain its initial critical attitude. Stalinism, for example, although common to both groups, had a far more deleterious impact on the evolution of Kurtulus,which adopted a Leninism mastered through the works of Stalin. This contributed to making Kurtulus, more capable bureaucratically, but impoverished its internal life and at its height at the end of the seventies, the theoretical monthly of Kurtulus, sold up to 12,000 copies

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while its weekly had perhaps twice that circulation. Devrimci-Yols fortnightly, by contrast, was at one point selling 100,000 copies. Moreover, the latter organization (as we have noted in the case of the famous Taksim assembly) could mobilize far broader support in Istanbul and had a substantial organizational network throughout Anatolia.7

Despite these important differences, however, Kurtulus, and Devrimci-Yol (together with some smaller groups and a large number of un-affiliated individuals) continued to constitute a third force of sorts on the Turkish left, without a loyalty to any official ideology experienced as such. The overall potential of this large, active and sui generis left is evident: it represented the key for a major breakthrough which might, under certain conditions, have led (and still might) toward the forma-tion of a new mass socialist party with democratic norms and a grasp of the originality of the Turkish social formation. Perhaps the most important (and arduous) question in this article is precisely why this breakthrough never occurred and why the independent forces of the Turkish left remained trapped within a field of sectarian politics, between the Maoists on one hand, and what in Turkey are known as the Sovietics, on the other.

The Maoists

The most important Maoist group, as previously explained, emerged from the pda split in the ndr movement who become pro-Chinese well before the 1971 coup. Originally called campus Maoists, the pdapossessed a talented nucleus of middle-class intellectuals and was able to launch a highly successful daily paper, Aydinlik. Experts in Maoist argumentation and ritualistic self-criticism, the pda was able to nego-tiate the tortuous path of sinophilic orthodoxy, following the Peking line through its various abrupt changes of direction and emphasis. To some extent pdas Maoism has also drawn an advantage from its reson-ance with anti-Russian propaganda and nationalist traditions in Turkey. Given pdas scrupulous orthodoxy and successful mass press, other Maoist sects have had to challenge them on a different terrain. The political competition in Turkey sometimes resembles an athletic one; the only way to overtake another group is by running on a different track, and Aydinliks weakness was militancy. After the military coup other Maoists attempted to outflank Aydinliks leadership

7 Because of its broad presence, Devrimci-Yol had to confront fascist attacks more often than any of its rivals. This, and its greater linkages to the masses, tended to make it more politically responsible, but it was still trapped by its official Cayanist ideology. The danger of this was vividly demonstrated by the split-off of the so-called Devrimci-Sol (Revolutionary Left) which openly defended Cayans idea that the role of an armed vanguard of the people should be to upset the artificial balance kept by the local state and imperialism, and thus to allow the eruption of the underlying revolutionary situation. Amongst their criticisms of Devrimci-Yol, oddly enough, was its establishment of a newspaper (because this had been explicitly condemned by Cayan earlier as opportunism) and its refusal to launch full-scale terrorist offensives against the state. Thus one of their first acts was to claim the assassination of Erim, the first Prime Minister after 12 March 1971. Their foolishness was evident in their slogans, such as: God forgives, but Devrimci-Sol does not! or Policeman! Take care, youre in an Devrimci-Sol zone!

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by issuing precipitate and infantile calls for a popular uprising. They circulated a clandestine paper which invited readers, almost with a rsvp, to join in the peoples war. The whereabouts and timing of this war were rather vague; however, amongst some peasants and in the Kurdish regions the call was taken seriously. One militant thought he had enough ammunition to set off the sparks, and this was the beginning of tikko or tkp-ml, a narrow-minded group which makes a special point about its ruthlessness. Meanwhile another Maoist group which has competed with Aydinlik by being more militant is hk, the Peoples Liberation group, who precipitated the May Day disaster at Taksim Square described at the beginning of the article. Converting to Maoism after the amnesty and representing the bulk of the Liberation Army guerrilla movement, hk temporarily became the largest of the pro-Peking factions. However they found it too awkward and distasteful to follow the Chinese leadership in giving support to Pinochet, Holden Roberto and so on. Yet when they tried to evade such embarrassing matters they were attacked by Aydinlik for not being consistently Maoist. They were thus relieved when the break with Albania allowed them to follow Hoxa and abandon official Chinese politics. Maoism had been an ill-fitting garment for the Peoples Liberation militants and better suited the less revolutionary Aydinlik and the congeries of smaller Maoist grouplets. Aydinlik itself retained influence because of the flair with which the paper was edited, enabling it to score some notable scoops.

The Sovietics

The growth of pro-Soviet sentiment on the Turkish new left occurred after the cresting of Maoism in 19745 and reflected a growing dis-illusionment with the rightward direction of Chinese foreign policy. The Maoists had, in their own crude way, originally brought the question of internationalism to the fore, but with Pekings increasingly brazen support for such as Pinochet and the Shah many militants became sympathetic to the seemingly more progressive international stance of the ussr. This rebound from Maoism allowed the old tkp to become a significant party in Turkey for the first time, but without allowing it to claim a monopoly over pro-Soviet politics as two other Moscow-oriented groups emerged. tip is the best known of these, probably because of its name and historic connections. It was refounded after the amnesty by Behice Boran, and has a small following with nothing like the former national presence of the old tip. In the late seventies its papers had a circulation of 5,000, which made it considerably smaller in the radius of its influence than the tkp. tsip, the Turkish Socialist Workers Party, the third pro-soviet group, has a curious national heritage. Its core consists of followers of the old Communist, Hikmet Kivilcimli, who was renowned for his voluminous and rather exotic writings advocating a uniquely Turkish synthesis of Leninism (at one point he even founded a Fatherland Party). Kivilcimli fled the country after the 1971 coup and died in exile in Yugoslavia. After the amnesty some of his followers teamed up with agroup of ex-tip suppor-ters to create the tsip.

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In 1975 the entire balance of influence within the Turkish left was shifted by tkps successful capture of posts inside disk at its annual congress. Suddenly tkp followers found themselves parachuted into the leader-ship of the countrys most militant union movement under the banner of Peace and Social Progress. The moment was one of the most decisive in the history of the Turkish working class. disk had retained great prestige during the coup and had expanded rapidly after the victory of Ecevit. Since its foundation disk had remained primarily a regional confederation centred around the industrial belt of the Istanbul-Marmora region. By the mid-seventies, however, a dramatic expansion of industrial investment in central Anatolia offered disk the opportunity to acquire national influence and achieve a key break-through in the state sector (long dominated by the more right-wing confederation, Turk Is,). In Seydis,ehir, near Konya, a vast aluminum plant was being built while new facilities were being added to the giant, Soviet-financed steel complex at Iskenderun. The importance of organizing this new proletariat, moreover, was not merely the augmen-tation of trade union power; for young workers from a peasant back-ground, membership in disk implied a radical break with traditional politics of deference and reliance on patronsdisk cleared the way for involvement in secular, socialist politics. Thus the tkp cadre within DISK were faced with the challenge of leading the majority of the left in supporting the slow, arduous work of organizing the new segments of the working class and consolidating disks power on a national scale. The tkp leadership, however, were more concerned with the selfish preservation of their own dominance within disk and refused to unite with other left-wing currents. Indeed, they joined with right-wing organizers and bureaucrats to purge the other left elementsespecially the TIP supporters in disk unions. They acted virtually as a political police force within disk to prevent all other socialist infiltration.

The result was a three-fold disaster. First, and most importantly, the struggles in Anatolia were lost. At the beginning the big aluminum plants were won, but instead of intensifying the workers education, tkp tried to win their confidence by consumer-society luresestab-lishing supermarkets, etc. The fascists then moved in, almost certainly with the encouragement of the Demirel government, and the workerspolitically and organizationally unprepared to fightpassively surrendered. Meanwhile in Iskenderun the fascist union won the workers referendum outright and recruitment into the metalworkers union of disk (Maden Is) abruptly halted. The second consequence was the failure of the principal actions initiated by the tkp. To compensate for their failure they called for a national strike and a walk-out by Maden Is, workers in the private sector. An attempt to launch a daily disknewpaper was also an expensive flop. The third consequence, of course, was the expulsion of other socialists from the unions. In general, instead of developing the politically inclusive character of disk and its potential attraction for the new proletarian strata, the tkp exploited disk as a politically exclusive surrogate party in its attempt to out-flank the rest of the revolutionary left. The ultimate result of its alliance with the rightists within disk and its support for the rpp (from whom it hoped to obtain eventual legalization) was the destruction of its own position. At the 1978 disk Congress the pro-tkp Chairman, Turkler,

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was voted out in predictable fashion and most of the tkp cadre purged by the social democrats. The tkps influence in disk thus came to an end leaving the confederation much weaker than it should have been and the Turkish left even more isolated from decisive sectors of the working class.

The Fascist Terror

From 1973 onwards fascism grew far more swiftly than the left. Although the bourgeoisie in Turkey was quite fragmented, the fascist right under the leadership of Trkes, was a unified movement with a single command, that had successfully combined legal and illegal methods. It had its camps and its police chiefs, its deputies and its army officers, its assassins and thugs, and in some areas also it held power. The introduction of martial law in parts of the country, under Ecevits premiership in 1979, did something to stem the fascist tide, which also carried along with it the usual flotsam of blunders. For example, there was a classic, premature attempt to reproduce a March on Rome except that the necessary parcel bombs sent to various mayors did not arrive in time thanks to the inefficiency of the postal system. Although provocations like this have produced numerous senseless responses by elements of the far left, there was absolutely no symmetry between the terrorism of the fascist party, supported by the Demirel government and intent upon seizing power, and the adventurous acts of elements of the left, whose terrorism was the product of the innumerable setbacks and disorientation since the military coup. In some parts of Anatolia, moreover, an exceptional situation existed where the left groups become the only bulwark of protection for the people against National Action death squads. In these areas of the fiercest fascist terror, it was primarily the militants of Devrimci-Yol who had to bear the brunt of the anti-fascist struggle and local self-defense. In some towns before the introduction of martial law half of the community was literally under fascist control, while the other half was defended by revolutionaries. But even when villages and sections of cities became indirectly admini-stered by the left groups, they showed a fatal inability to do more than display their martial courage. No communal reforms were launched or popular bodies created which might have shown the local people how to organize or improve their conditions. Thus when the army finally arrived to impose the more universal justice of martial law, the people said to the militants, Thank you for protecting us, but now please go away.

IV. A Painful Balance Sheet

A Superficial Marxism

While living through its own catastrophic defeats, the Turkish left has also suffered painful disillusionment elsewhere. It felt very keenly the destruction of Allende and the Tupamaros in Latin America. It watched with astonishment the developments in China. It rejoiced at first with Portugal, and then disciplined itself not to mention it again. It gnashed its teeth at the European Communists hurling Marx and Lenin over-board. It is still trying to digest the war between Vietnam and Cam-

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bodia. It has had to undergo primitive education at a time when the demands of the moment were overwhelming, and it went into action before any training and with hardly a glimpse at the rules of the game. It is not surprising, then, that its growth has been ulcerous. My criticisms have been sharp, and I think it evident that a major operation is necessary. Yet however severe, I do not feel myself to be the surgeon in this case, but rather the patient.

When the revolutionary movement began in the 1960s, an average militant trying to learn Marxist theory would have read classics such as Anti-Dhring or What is to be Done? learnt dialectical materialism through Stalins manual and Politzers texts, and at the same time attempted a coherent explanation for himself of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, rising anti-Sovietism in the Peoples Republic of China and its Cultural Revolution, and the struggle of Che Guevara and other Latin American guerilla leaders. He could find very little native tradition to help him in his confrontation with such events. At the same time, although there was a lot to be learned, there was a lot to do, too. The Turkish left could not but live through a warped growth. In the fragmentation that followed, although the groups undoubtedly represented different versions of Marxism and there was a great deal of hostility between them, there were obvious similarities amongst their cadres: in mentality, values and behaviour. In the first place this was due to a common class origin: most were students from petty-bourgeois families, and expressed the traditions of that sector. A militant from a working-class background would soon conform to the dominant pattern, in so far as he became a militant, and would thereby behave differently from his working-class friends. All in all, a relatively com-pelling form of revolutionary-conventional behaviour could be observed.

The way Marxism has been successful among students while it has not been in any real sense among the working class may be explained by the relative strength and weakness of the dominant ideology. As a prag-matic ideology of nationalism, with a strong emphasis on enlighten-ment and progress, Kemalism was ideal for a rising bourgeoisie. It is still a unifying ideology for the majority of the peoplewho have been constantly fed with itand a pliable tool for the ruling classes who can justify both repression or liberalism with it. But it cannot endure the critical gaze of those with a higher level of education, whose radical-ism it had initially encouraged. In such an encounter Marxist theory won a relatively easy victory; one that was too easy. The thought contents, in the newly converted militants mind, are perhaps radically changed; however the method of thought itself remains relatively untouched. Marxism becomes a new doctrine, more convincing, but nevertheless a doctrine to be learnt by heart. There was, in other words, an appropriation of Marxism which transformed its theory into closed ideology, even a faith. One could see this as a necessary or inevitable stage in a process of transformationif only the subsequent stages had followed. Until now the necessary conditions to conduct such a process have not come into being. It would have to include a political organiza-tion which in the Gramscian sense operates like a collective intellec-tual, raising the level of theoretical consciousness. In Turkish intellect-

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tual life, the left enjoys a scarcely rivalled supremacy. The great majority of thinkers, writers and artists are leftists, and a considerable number of them claim to be Marxists. Although this contributes to Turkeys having a cultural life which would be envied in some respects even by certain more advanced societies, at the same time there is a definite distance between socialist intellectuals and socialist political move-ments. This is as much a product of the unwillingness of the intelligentsia to become more active as the militants common attitudeof rejecting anything that seems so soft as theory or art. The lack ofsuch organic links, of course, contributes to the theoretical and cultural shallowness of the political cadres.

The Obsession with Power

In the peculiar political conjuncture of the late sixties, with a crisis of, and competition for, power, among the ruling classes, it was relatively easy for the vigorous student movement to become immersed in a debate on the correct strategy for seizing power. In this debate tip hadrightlyemphasized the importance of capitalistic development. But it failed to advance a convincing revolutionary strategy, and succumbed before the ndr which emphasized the underdeveloped, third worldcharacter of Turkey. Even in this debate, at least the question of strategy was debated in relation to the structure of the country. However, afterwards, in the seventies, the question of strategy was approached as one takes up a cookery book to produce a marvellous dishin which both the structure of the country and the masses were no more than mere ingredients. The question of power became an obsession. The fetishization of immediate power and total struggle drew the left further and further away from reality. It created an intro-vert quality amongst the revolutionary groups as a whole. Every group needs growth; the easiest way is to convert supporters of other groups; one groups mistake and loss means the reverse for the other; as each group is burdened with an equal number of disappointments, there is a constant traffic from one to the other which keeps everyone busy and content with minor gains. Each in its own way, every group from the tkp to Kurtulus, to Aydinlik, was so engaged.

In the process, revolutionary language was transformed into a tech-nical jargon. To win other militants each organization had to prove its own courage, in a way designed to attract militants, which of course scared away interested workers or peasants. The tkp tried soft slogans about progress with no class content whatsoever, but these seemed out of place, and the partys followers had to show-off their position in disk, etc, with the results described. Before martial law the numerous journals that were published by the groups and tendencies were primarily aimed at stopping any loss of cadres. Far from attracting new members by speaking directly to the working class public about the real situation, these propaganda organs created little disquiet amongst the bourgeoisie and remained generally unintelligible.

As the groups gathered around their theories, which in reality function as emblems or perhaps trade-marks, militants define their specificityaccording to a few abstract formulae, which represent the honour of

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the group and are thus inevitably petrified. The general outcome was the gradual diminishing of internal democracythis, in a country that is not traditionally famed for its democratic norms. The groups are thus isolated and inevitably pushed into defensive positionsdefensive against the bourgeoisie as well as towards other groups. The Turkish left has for some time ceased to speak in a coherent way about national problems: a critique or analysis of questions of health and medicine, or transport and urbanization, or village organization, or factory life, is not even attempted. Instead of demonstrating that there are rational and reachable alternatives to the urgentand obviously socialproblems of everyday life, Turkish socialists offer voluminous debates as to whether or not the Theory of the Three Worlds is opportunist.

Another factor which has helped to reproduce this kind of crippled politics, and also to keep the left divided in the face of the growing threat of fascism, has been the ubiquitous presence of the traitor. We are the best-intentioned people, we have science, the proletariat is the revolutionary class, the unwavering course of history is with us. In spite of all these wonderful assets, we barely make any revolutions worth mentioning. It cannot just be the enemy only that is hindering us, because capitalism is moribund, and the ruling classes have many crises. What is this unknown factor that is barring the way? It can only be a traitor. In our revolutionary movement, this archetype of the traitor has always been present in some form or another. Of course there may be a certain justification for the accusation in a few cases, but it is the accompanying attitude that is important. The belief lightens the burden, and, conversely, in order for the relief to be greater, so must be the dose of hatred of the betrayer. The more the pre-capitalist ideology is alive, the more room exists for the reproduction of these attitudes and thought mechanisms. In the Turkish socialist movement which is young and inexperienced, but also energetic and hopeful, which has seen itself as an alternative for power (however mistaken the vision) and has exhausted all the means and models devised for that end, today, in its semi-tragic astonishment, such mechanisms are necessary.

The Centrality of Socialist Democracy

I have stressed the factor of inexperience. One can predict that after the upheavals of the seventies, some of these problems will be solved in the eighties. For the Turkish left will no longer be young. To keep this kind of youth after such an experience would suggest a pathological inability to grow up. What could be the direction for a mature growth? The line of advance is not necessarily within the orthodox class organizations, and should certainly not be limited to them, especially with the conditions created by the fascist assault. Mass political organi-zation would seem to have a greater potential in local associations of all kinds, from the big cities to the villages, where varieties of interest come together. Here, more democratic and egalitarian relations that might prefigure a future society could be pioneered. There are many spontaneous local movements which revolutionary socialists should help to articulate at a national level, without the exigencies of centralized decisions undermining democracy at the base level. A programme is of

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prime importance in so far as its principles of action can be rooted in activity which itself draws upon real conditions, and is not imposed. As much unity as possible will be necessary, with democracy its absolutely necessary condition, since those who unite will have come together with different histories. There can be no democratic and energetic unity based upon a liquidation of the felt validity of the revolutionary experience of others. Similarly, concrete goals can be clarified only by democratic procedures, in which the cadres will have a lot to learn from workers and peasants, housewives and specialists. To reduce Marxism to a theory of armed struggle is to turn it into a theory of death. To understand it as a theory of life rather than a rationale for brave resist-ence, socialists in Turkey will have to submit to the creative power of those whom they aspire to lead.

There are few groups in Turkey, Communist, Maoist or independent, which would not pay lip-service to democracy. Indeed they would grant its importance: what is needed is their democracy. What is really necessary is a rather profound transformation. The fragmentation of the Turkish left as a whole, including many in the rpp, stems in part from a shared misconception. When various parties all accept a premise which is itself wrong, their subsequent disagreements become irrecon-cilable. It is an old law. Each sees in the other the falseness of that solution, and becomes committed to the correctness of their own. But, as the premise is wrong, there can be no correct solution. A resolution is only possible if the terms of the argument are transformed. It is in this respect that emphasis upon democracy challenges the universal characteristic of the Turkish left.

For what all Turkish socialists share in common still is the belief that they must seek an eastern solution to the countrys problems. This is true of Ecevit, the saviour of the state, who despite his more progres-sive policies is less capable of conducting plural politics than Demirel, who in this respect is the more advanced figure. Ecevits attempt to create a peoples sector of the economy when he got back to office in 1978 was typical of an tatism designed to bring the masses out of their backwardness, from above. The same perspective of getting Turkey to catch up and obtain its independence may be seen in all the other socialist groups. The attachment of the best and most open independentsDev-Yol and Kurtulus,to the traditions of their armed-struggle past, to a semi-Stalinist version of Leninism, and a militarist solution to the problem of fascism clearly evoke an eastern solution. So too, of course, do the slogans and analysis of the Maoist groups. The tkp and its pro-Soviet associates are distinctly not Eurocommunist in their orientation, and their advanced democracy is evidently more backward than that already on offer from the Turkish bourgeoisie during the 1970s. This is not to suggest that a Turko-communism is needed which would seek to discover an equivalent to Berlinguers historic compromise with Christian Democracy. On the contrary, the left has already experienced exactly such a strategy in left-Kemalism, in that this had a similar identification with received forms of state-power.

The paradox which Marxists need to assimilate is that although Turkey

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is a relatively backward country economically (it had a per capita gnpof Algeria and Mexico in 1977) and socially (its adult literacy rate was only 60% in 1975), it has been relatively advanced politically. Despite military interventions it has known a two-party system in which opposing leaders have changed office a number of times after a popular mandate, something which has never happened in Japan for example. This imbalance arose from the fact that the country was never directly colonized and has retained its own sovereignty; to its peculiar combi-nation of West and East. An early nationalism that defied the Sultan, Ataturks was both a modernizing and an unpopular mobilization. The whole problem of consent in Turkey, in a process of violent economic transformation, has thus become acutely difficult for the ruling class, which is at the same time one that knows the benefits of constitutional law.

The military intervention has now created a new situation for both left and right. In immediate terms the National Action Party is now less advantageously placed while the left has borne the brunt of a fierce repression. But hopefully the left will have learnt at least some of the bitter lessons of recent years and address itself in a more united and sober fashion to the task of building a socialist resistance with real roots among the oppressed and exploited. The contradictions of Turkish bourgeoisie have not been solved by the soldiers, and military rule, however indefinite, will not be able to suppress the potential for working class organization.

Correction: In Jon Hallidays article Capitalism and Socialism in East Asia, nlr124, p. 9, Table 3, the entry for Singapore in column 7 for the year 1977, referring to its % share of world industrial production, should have read (0.10) and not (0.0).

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